IN CONCERT, BILL FRISELL AND HIS ELECTRIC GUITAR SPEAK VOLUMES.

Byline: - Reed Johnson 

Trying to anticipate what electric guitarist Bill Frisell will play on any given occasion is like trying to guess the winning numbers in a Lotto game.

Armed with a seemingly bottomless repertoire, Frisell is comfortable with virtually any musical idiom, from Bob Dylan folk tunes to streamlined interpretations of orchestral works by Aaron Copland and Charles Ives, to John Zorn's avant-garde rock and Madonna's pop hit ``Live to Tell.''

Last Friday, in the first of two shows at McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, the shy-mannered musician stuck mainly to the kind of sinuous jazz-country fusion found on such recent releases as ``Nashville'' and its follow-up, ``Gone, Just Like a Train.'' Moodily backed by veteran rock drummer Jim Keltner and bluegrass acoustic bass player Viktor Krauss, Frisell extracted beautiful, impressionistic harmonies and eccentric tempos from his material.

Frisell's shotgun marriage of jazz and country styles falls somewhere between Lyle Lovett's spiky urbanity and Bela Fleck's high-speed flights of fancy. At times Friday night, Frisell sounded downright ethereal, picking his way through notes as carefully as if he were threading a bed of nasturtiums. On tunes like ``Verona,'' his guitar bloomed into delicate melodic clusters - sensuous if somewhat aimless.

At other moments, Frisell cut loose like a Mississippi Delta bluesman, bending notes and squeezing chords until they begged for mercy.

A careful student of signal-processing technology, Frisell avails himself of the full gamut of electronic tricks: high-decibel distortions, tones stretched to the breaking point, and so on. Yet these techniques generally resulted in melodic insight rather than mere showmanship. Nashville, with its current crop of overproduced country-pop clones, should take note.

Growing chattier as the too-brief, 80-minute set moved on, Frisell concluded one tune, ``Pleased to Meet You,'' with a self-deprecating story about meeting Willie Nelson in a Scandinavian airport. Initially, Frisell had mistaken Nelson and his band for European country-western wanna-bes.

``I felt like a jerk,'' Frisell confessed.

Not to worry. Like Nelson, Nashville's original noncomformist, Bill Frisell knows you can't always judge a country sympathizer by his cowboy boots.